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About the Project

‘Artefacts of Excavation’ is a 3-year, AHRC-funded collaborative project led by Dr Alice Stevenson at UCL, and Professor John Baines at the University of Oxford, together with the full-time project researcher Dr Emma Libonati, web-developer Dr Sarah Glover, Ashmolean Keeper Liam McNamara and project DPhil student Alice Williams. It is an ambitious project that is creating an online resource for the relocation and re-contextualization of distributed artefacts from excavation, and will explore the role of these distributions in the development of archaeology and museology. The project aims to address the following questions:

(a) What was the scale and scope of the distribution of finds from British excavations in Egypt between 1880 and 1980? Where are these collections now?

(b) What do these finds distributions reveal about the changing relationship between museums, field archaeology and the development of research between 1880 and 1980?

(c) How were local, regional, national, and international identities (including colonial relations) negotiated through the circulation of antiquities from Egypt? How may these be understood in relation to questions of the ownership of Egyptian heritage today?

(d) How were ancient Egyptian artefacts from British excavations accommodated within different museums around the world? How may these local narratives be linked with wider developments in archaeology and museology?